This is one of the poems that got me fired from my job at the Greater Fort Myers Beach Chamber of Commerce. The president, who fired me, told Douglas, who also works there, that board members and others were sending her excerpts of things I’d “penned”, claiming I was making fun of them.
If you are reading this poem on a phone, note that the integrity of the lines, a major feature of poetry, is not displayed properly. Many if not most get cut short because of the small screen.
For both a ride on me, ageless against you, and the age of the suns, I’ll be thousands of fallin’ underneath my mind, startled by the springs of enlightenment, and the cards are in play but too grandiose for my design.
Involved in the history, I’m not chuckin’ wood, but let’s face it I’m this little man in a little play. Now look, even in my beach job parking lot the herald of swift event patterned life. I saw the nuances of things to come, and I was a bearer there.
You can’t grasp this in your hand. I held the Earth in impossible lilies. I knew it was a steamboat. I handled it carefully every damn day. Can you imagine sleep without it? It held me at night, working on its intricacies.
I saw the world comin’. It held my gasping hand in its own. It was a birthday kiss. It was a holocaust of things known. I did not put all my rocks there. I had bigger plans than Earth.
Can you starry enlightenment? It will do you away. You’re not there seein’ it. You’ve disappeared, standin’ right there in the middle of it, and you’ve gone father than the world.
I know this land. I can’t describe it to you. It’s taken the world away in perfect seeing. I am not sure of its moorings. My times there have been brief, but you hear it in my gifted speech.
A whole field’s to play, famous hotel, unknown to the world. Can you imagine seeing the impossible, a world where none is, sights and sounds that not be, thoughts where none be, a whole world arise from the Void where nonexistence is? What arises now?
I don’t know if I’m worth this. I don’t know if it’ll come, the springboards of the Earth a seer’s grasp, the passive in God’s hands, the no-self of enlightenment, the end of suffering for individual man.
The floodgates are open for this puny start, a beach bellhop boy liberals through the strong right-wing the doors of enlightenment, contentment and peace, where the wild things are. I carry that trailer. I tarry there.
It’s worth it, no firecrackers in the belly. Wish you that payment. I started looking at shiny objects. I realized there was a behind the behind in every word that’s true, when you touch base with reality.
I wanted a bridge. The vehicles of enlightenment silence the world, engineer reality to make the grand crossing. Uh-Huh, there’s a reality there enlightenment leads to, the nature of reality, where we come from.
And you think you’ve stalled on enlightenment? There’s a beyond. It studies the world for you. It’s its master design. The roads ever get deep. Another universe holds this one in ours, and we go on from there.
The All-Encompassing All-At-Once is the study of the game, and we’re on flat level Earth, the first rising structure to pick up This land. How can I get this across?
No sight can show you it. No mode of thought gets there. You can sit in the All-At-Once of the sun to use a metaphor, and there you can see the dynamics swiftly over your head in a secret passage to our Source.
Now bring enlightenment into the picture. It’s stills the world for you to get to the other side into the reality beyond the universe, into the reality that made us.
Glory in the spoken word of poetry. One bad dream is this universe to cross. Right this minute, can you get the sense of creation? Can you see it larger than the book?
We went past it. What happened? We got services hello Cape Canaveral. One accident, it’s gonna be close. Till Hunter gets back we don’t leave reality to the fishes. We get out of these beach suits, the mere survival looking for enjoyment, the group mind. I’ll be right back. And it was a hunter for spiritual dawns.
Can you see that out of the routine? Bonanza, we’ve established this fact on earth again. The pilot’s license, where we start. Oh my God my head on my shoulders, this is like the bus you know.
Me at work at the Roxie, photo by a kind tourist lady named Eleanor, taken just after writing the poem
This is one of the poems that got me fired from my job at the Greater Fort Myers Beach Chamber of Commerce. The president, who fired me, told Douglas, who also works there, that board members and others were sending her excerpts of things I’d “penned”, claiming I was making fun of them.
If you are reading this poem on a phone, note that the integrity of the lines, a major feature of poetry, is not displayed properly. Many if not most get cut short because of the small screen.
I sit and toil all day at the heart’s sky, laboring meaning into form that won’t surprise me with its despair.
I unhand time. It seizes me. I believe in miracles. It’s all a wonderful of the All-Look’s gaze. I labor to see that.
I can remember it happening long ago. All the sights I see hide God. Can you hide God? It’s a revelation in a day, the abruptness of creation organizing time.
I can see through the forms cloud my mind with meaning. That bus that just stopped there, it stayed a bus, but it carried mystery.
The people at the bar getting drunk next door, a singer sings their songs. I can’t find the music or the melody they become more than sharks wetting their nose on freedom.
I carry them in time, the little guy at the Roxie station wagon tourist information center, seeing past the show into metaphor’s play.
Bathing suits and butts don’t know what they mean. Their wearers are proud of them. They walk past smiling don’t look stirring sexual desire.
I don’t know how to do this, be a Roxie concierge and assign God to the role. I just mean somethin’ to everyone. My hand is ever on time’s grasp, “Yes ma’am, can I help you please?”
I study tourists tryin’ to find time a meal on paradise. Can I help you folks? Every meaning gets bigger than time and be what it means for.
Can you see that? Every meaning we look at wears the face of God, but every dog knows God is horribly attentive to things you don’t understand.
I will find meaning there. I will reach beyond the Earth and sit at the Roxie and be myself guiding tourists to their destination on Fort Myers Beach. Yah get me dog?
The podium on the stage of the Art Hall in Koreshan State Park, Florida, where the utopian religious group, Koreshan Unity, had its community, whose founder and prophet was Cyrus Teed. A visit and a meditation there inspired this poem.
This is one of the poems that got me fired from my job at the Greater Fort Myers Beach Chamber of Commerce. The president, who fired me, told Douglas, who also works there, that board members and others were sending her excerpts of things I’d “penned”, claiming I was making fun of them.
If you are reading this poem on a phone, note that the integrity of the lines, a major feature of poetry, is not displayed properly. Many if not most get cut short because of the small screen.
In dreams and visions my voices speak. What are you doing over here? I’m a religious nut. I can’t control myself I hear visions. I count the salesmen in my dreams. Go wake up humanity, I can’t count the number of times I tried. I can’t even get a word across.
This is not save the world vision. I mean like I’ll never forget that I made the wrong sort of mud pies. I write poetry to reach the world. I’m not a religious figure to charm it. I’ve opened up consciousness inside. There’s no barnstormin’. I’m a quiet place takin’ a mile. I sit and read muse, no religious fanaticism, but I answer questions bluntly and with sarcasm. Let’s see what stinks here. Your mind.
Flying saucers from outer space did not tell me a thing. I have not been visited by angels tellin’ me I’m the man. I don’t want to get in your pants. I don’t want you to obey me. I would like a better society. I would like to say things that mean somethin’. I would like to hold your hand, where you don’t look down on me. I would like to lift you up in your mind where you think and touch that heart of yours.
We have a society here growin’ money and hate your neighbor. The mind of us is not the best of us. Our souls are only beliefs not houses kept. We think each other wrong. We don’t hand out society so you’re a prized member. That’s the rich and famous. We don’t know how to do it, be kind to one another, and it’s not a social laugh, the uncomfortableness of putting each other down to get at time with one another, or at best we keep our distance from heartfelt communication. We laugh at one another and wear big social masks to prove it, or we’re tryin’ to sell somethin’ when fake that sincerity.
Who is vulnerable and sweet? Who lets their guard down and give people meaningful communication? Our minds are full of the kingdoms of ourselves. And I’m not sure how to write that. Would you group with me? I’m a group-minded person, and I give group to my human being. I don’t consider other groups human, the Democratic Party for instance, or those Republicans. Man I love everybody. Now you everybody’s get off the bus. I’m lying to my social lying. I can only tolerate certain people.
You disguised my I, and I’m sharin’ in your business I don’t understand. You’re not the biggest people in the world Americans. You’re not even tryin’. What happened to me? There are changes in consciousness ahead. I’ve had some previews. I was not someone you handled correctly. You didn’t know how to see me, and I just fucked up. I got intah trouble. The previews came as a start to help me feel you as I feel myself, even if you look down on me.
I saw humanity. I’ve seen the world as my eye, no, no, not its offerings to me. I am a vision of the world as we speak. We look out each other’s eyes, in the world being that we are, and we look out the eyes of God, who is the vision everything. It is possible to break free from single vision’s number lair, from one pole of consciousness don’t you see? I’m about that vision. It’s universal. We all share it.
We’re lost in me’s and the boundaries of our group. I’m so sorry this chain gang has defeated my eyes too. Can I help you some see the truth, reality as it is, no religious overlays, no scientism that can’t see past its own nose? Reality’s bigger than you think, and you have identity outside of time. You aren’t this puny self laboring on a hapless globe that can’t see itself and know it’s true. You’ve put on actors wings, and it’s a hell of a ride ain’t it?
And all your dreams represent things to you because you are representative in time. You’re bigger than you think, in household wears, not your peckin’ order. You are actually beyond the stars lookin’ through a thin pigeonhole at that embarrassed I down in time. We’re all naked down here, and pride just can’t seem to go with us to sleep. It takes coffee to perk it up, and who knows the master plan of the universe? Kids we are and kids we’ll be, until we wake up on ourselves.
Do you know a mature notion? It’s not here, in every man for himself, in the little world we’ve made, in the societies we’ve engendered that make you obey it like it’s a real group but blames its faults on individuals, a world that does not know itself.
Good works and technology, you can’t move the field there. We have consciousness to change, and that’s not a thought process. The consciousness changes into its larger type. I’m puttin’ this in your hands, the ideal for the ages, the thing we’ve been workin’ at all along. It’s not a messiah you see. It’s not wings from outer space. You do the change and me, and we get bigger than ourselves. Blinded I am?
A lot of things up there I don’t like to talk about. It’s a mess up there, and it chases your life. I’m an idiot for believing it. There’s no hope on this runway. I can’t even see my dogs. I lost all the people who matter to me. They’ve taken me out of India for a visa violation. Can you imagine Dylan?
I had several minutes to pack. Nithish came and we talked. Everybody was crying. No appeal allowed. They were stone-hearted men. The immediacy of the situation derailed me. I was not prepared to go. No one would listen to my pleas just a few days please. It was heartbroken. The dogs were so confused. Bruno knew. The pain in that dog’s eyes, can it kill you?
Who knows the price you have to pay for poetry? I made the Auroville Foundation mad, and they promptly got rid of me and didn’t even show their face. Their lackeys did it. I’m going to shoot them tomorrow, not with guns with their guilt. Douglas and I are on a plane to nowhere. We’ve been kicked out of our home. I am over skies now. I don’t know where I am. I don’t care to. I will never see my dogs again.
A few minutes to pack after a life of 20 years. No international rights, what do you do with that when your life-blood is on the table, all your hopes and dreams? Even Nithish’s parents cried, and we all forgave each other. So many crying people came to see up off, and it didn’t move a cop.
This is land’s lamb, a spoken inner voice, and it will even tell on itself. It won’t leave you alone. To trust it is to invite paradise, but hell is its price. Pain and suffering slam me now, and I don’t know what to do with that. More poetry please. Look I gotta get out of this ride. Most things have to be deleted anyway. I’m sorry. Look it’s over.
What happened? The government has cancer. It only has a gun. It breaks people’s hearts, is only concerned with its name, can’t see past its own nose, is a bear eating people. No one can call it on it. You get in trouble. They won’t let you talk. When you give them a divinely inspired poem they get mad, shoot the messenger, tear apart his family.
What’s the wasted gun, where I meet the government, or where it meets me? Hand that over a hide and seek. Show dinner now how much bullshit serves me on myself, or am I worth the life of this poet?
Plenty of people have no pride. It’s part of the hardship of life. Do we let then in? Do we let the haphazard come in? They’ll throw it open like they’re dying without it. They are not sincere. They’re trying to get over on you whatever they can. They can’t look you in the eye and say they’re sorry. They’re all over the place, a dim a dozen.
I need to know what that man’s like. Test him some. Come to his house and sit at his table. Is there anybody but himself in his banyan tree who are not satellite I’s of his solar I? Can he have compassion? Will he sacrifice for those around him? Is he a hope in humanity’s heart? Does he genuinely feel the presence of others? What does it take to make him smile? Can you count lighthouse in him?
I’m askin’ the right questions say you find an illegal immigrant. These are the criteria we live by, and he needs to show that. Can I get a horseman here please? We’re blowin’ humanity out of the water throwin’ somebody out of the country such as these. An immigrant’s status give the immigrant’s worth?
Look at yesterday. They pull a poet out of his home. Because I didn’t read his poetry. I listened to the bossman. We celebrate this. You’re at 1 o’clock. Put more tickets through. It’s all good. Put the police upon the table, and this defends a society of Indian spirituality?
Our family there were told that the Secretary of the Auroville Foundation, Jayanti Ravi, filed a police complaint against me for the past three poems on this blog, which are about Auroville. Four men came to our house, all in civilian clothes, and only one would show his ID, the one from immigration, whom it’s reasonable to assume that they brought just in case there was a visa violation, and there was. Later, since I was holding out in my house, the regular police came.
Recently Auroville News and Notes reported that the Auroville Foundation has brought 15 members of the special police who are crushing dissidence in Kashmir to do that in Auroville. I suspect at least two of the men who wouldn’t show ID were them.
The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi at the great Banyan Tree in Auroville on February 25, 2018. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and the Prime Minister’s Office (GODL-India)
From the paths of the Alone, if it’s any consolation, I alone this to you, the next lesson cheerio. The heart of Auroville is the banyan tree establish the Earth oneness drive everything. The Infinite of days, things are stepped back, exploded on the scene: I hate this bible; I have a schoolbook to cram down your throat, the rules and regulations; I just wanna have fun. The voices chorus. Just leave my damn trees alone and my vegetables— I’m sustainable Auroville. I’ve got some rocket science get yah, a whole lot of Sri Aurobindo— the Mother’s disciples’ Auroville.
It’s a land grab right in the heart of the city, and then the government comes in and makes you disciples of her all the way to India that’s the tower we find. It makes you want to pull up stakes, the whole registry. A failed experiment has come apart on itself. You can’t get there from here. You can’t even try. You just sit and wait for another dawn.
Where do we go wrong? The goodwill to continue. It doesn’t hurt anybody. It doesn’t seek them shame. It’s taller than a government and is not about right of way. It has no agenda to sell you at the expense of itself. It’s charitable to everybody, even the weak. It has no bad man. Goodwill lifts him out of that. It’s good to everybody.
The fundamentals of goodwill started this place, and all this was hijacked early on and has led to today, a fractured Auroville. Policy glows in goodwill, is meant for the right change, and it glows on our vegetables. People’s particulars glow in goodwill to come right themselves. This is not known among you? If you see the fruit you see the tree. Goodwill governs all, and that’s where we land Auroville to come back to itself. Are you going to fight this? Are you going to make it mean?
The heart collapsed, the heart of Auroville. It puts lunch in children’s boxes and go all over India. Get to every place on earth, the Auroville plane. This trap is completely in our noosphere, such is the spirit of this endeavor, the daunting human-wide of Auroville.
You’ve blocked me with anger and ill will from the anger and ill will in the very pocketbook of Auroville, the poet of your gifted change, the poet sent here to warn you. Just come and govern everything with ill will, is this just your blindness or your willful stance? Time of death, is that the lesson of Auroville?
This is the form of the divine. I report that they are only satellites. It's all fences regarding the sun. We can’t get at that meat in the matter. It’s too broad-minded you, and you will not meet us there. I cough this up now a poem rose in certain straits, but I’m not in a tin can. The availability of truth is relative to the participant, but I tell you sincerity guides my house. It’s what I lean on. I can get closer to the truth, but will you meet me there? Will you even try?
Oh my goodness Auroville, that’s the study sheet, that’s what we make our daily rounds: ever widening to the truth, ever widening to contain it all, to stand at last on higher ground, to get there, the reason Auroville was made. We localize human divinity here, and that is ever the strength now.
I attempted to send this poem via email to recipients in Auroville, but my email ID was blocked. I’d sent the previous poem on this blog, “The New Business”, to all the addresses that blocked this one. This poem and the previous one made the secretary of Auroville, Jayanti Ravi, mad, and she got me kicked out of India over it, personally.
I couldn’t come from the city according to our needs. A oneness organization, that’s the start of it, the city the Earth needs. The walls are coming down, it’s where we begin. This is the largest city in Heaven, and it’s expensive to live in.
How many people protect themselves from the Infinite? How many people have bibles they won’t cross thresholds with? They can’t get out of the Book or this Name says. They can’t plant infinity there, and they argue and bicker among themselves about it, the rulebook says.
Am I just a hedonistic paradise? I sacrifice even my thoughts to the divine and live a simple life to prove it. I don’t cut down banyan trees. I sit together with everybody there, and I know hard work, and I know rest and play.
I love God, and that is my first priority, not the God of this man says, the God of the banyan tree. I have seen God’s eyes staring back at me in everyone’s. I can pet a dog and feel that, rub a cat.
I am about the mountain in springtime. I know how to address the world: oh my God I love you. I have seen fire and rain, and I changed my life because of it. I no longer hurt people or cause them pain. I draw the lines everywhere to prevent that. I know the meaning of sacrifice. It’s how my thoughts meet the world. It’s how my hands meet the day.
I am an Aurovillian comes theoretically, and I shout this to the Earth. I will get bigger than my kind. I will transform consciousness inside into our greater type. I will give birth to divinity on a collective field, and our hands will salt the Earth with its great and needed change, and I am here my friend opening doors for you that you may walk through them. Auroville will you hear me? Auroville can you feel that looking?
This poem was emailed to many Auroville email addresses, most all the principle leadership bodies, and it was the object of an art action on Sept 3rd and 4th, where I and Mithun taped and tacked it up on bulletin boards and walls around Auroville and on banyan trees in the township, or it was just handed to individuals. This is the performance art a recent poem, “The Diamond”, mentioned, before, I might add, there was inkling on my part to do any.
This poem and the preceding one made the secretary of Auroville, Jayanti Ravi, mad, and she got me kicked out of India over it, personally.
The muse gave me a message to you, the muse rise and poetry. I’ll see it in the garbage can, won’t I? I don’t know how to negotiate this landmine in outer things. Every world has rejected me. I’m a nation to nobody, dear reader except you. This is across the board. It’s unhand me. It’s blue and it’s red and it’s gold. It’s unbelievably tight.
What do you say to no, we don’t want to have anything to do with you, and this is the entire of the yoga you follow, the city on earth that’s to realize the human dream and be alright with each other? I get kicked out of there too and in the hearts of every man and every woman who could make it possible to see my boy again right out in the open his daddy again, and that anomaly is solved: why the divine in-look on me carries his name, and it is a phantom make.
I stand here confused. Even the halls of poetrydom have spit me out. I have no place in society. I live in some little island of bright, and Douglas and our dogs hold the world together. Our visitors only want something, all they can get, and they only come here for that. We have no friends here. We have no one looking out for us. We are here alone and that’s it. This squeezes you, you know? You don’t understand when humanity and the world mean so much to you.
I’ve painted this isolation for myself. Douglas has friends and family who care for him and provide, else we wouldn’t make it. He lives in his room and I live in mine, but our best-friendship has reached the stars, but can I tell you about Paul? A friend for all the years, who is in the world at large giving me e-blasts I’m your friend. When the world rejects you, you get compensation, friends for all the world, if you’re holdin’ hands with the world, if the world means as much to you as yourself.
I can’t bear this, spit on by everyone, and I’m just diggin’ my hole deeper with these poems. They cost me so much. They tear me apart I am so real with you. I don’t know how to begin to really say it, the be there of the human being.
Oh my God I want to describe it to you, so we can join there. I want you to see my humanity. I don’t want to be an outcast no more. Oh I wish you could feel that. God does, and he’s here with me all day in bright thoughts and muse on the edge of time. Would that you could feel that.
A meaningful life, that’s established. Come to terms with myself and terms deeper. This is all in the sky. I’m a blockchain. I matter to mankind. I’m significant to your notions of self. I’m good to all you haven’t seen yet. I love people and feel their oneness. I am not about the snake. I touch you with deep meaning. I am really there.
The world blows up inside me it has eyes. I commune with the Unknown. I’m about your rocket ship. I ease on you these things: the starling oneness inside us, the jumprope to God, everything we have to do with each other in our ballpark with children and the animals in the room. You hear me there petting my dogs in wonder and taking children to the sky.
I cook meals for you and attend to your business all day. I am not just a selfish wound. I have lifted up the race everywhere I look. I am dawn on you the understanding of poet, and here I am, in my most serious mood, standing up and be counted, because you’ve shunned my face, a rocket-man that knows we share meaning together, that knows my part in the world, that knows I can’t live without you.
You’ve kicked me out of your homes, you’ve kicked me out of your hearts long enough. I’m not a beggar at your gates. I’m the poet at high noon. It’s time we fly. It’s time we fly.
Everyone feels themselves the maker of things. Alone in our body’s cells, we do a branded work. We have the secret knowledge inside, and we know the meanings of things. We just can’t express itself to men. We live in our longings a perpetual keeper unable to handle stuff, but ours is the mooring to the base of life. We know no one above us in this, and even ones that we worship, they’ve just validated ourselves. We can keep them. No one else can.
I am the secret front of time. The world calls my name human. I am a draft everyone wears in their rise to fame. I can’t control fate, and the talent show, I can’t grate my time against it, but I am bigger than lost rooms, or, if I am famous, for your information, I’ve been put there by all eyes on me, and the knife I am to everyone I don’t have to please, it’s sought within, and I believe mine eyes hold all true. I’m good to everyone even if I’m not good to some. I am the eyes of life and time in my living room.
Surprise, surprise, surprise, you are not the march of the universe, or anything tall and big. You are a worm’s crawl to our Sublime, and you would spit on the Sublime now, if you saw it. You would not hold it right. You would not even know it’s there in your tangible real.
I fight this battle every day, sometimes on a horse, sometimes in the slime of morose doubt. I can count my sins all day long. I can sit and bash myself upon the head for being such an eager worm. Here’s the kitten: I sit in the arms of the divine all day. My doubt is not to its existence. I have knowledge firmly there. I see the Larger like I take breaths, but is this a whirlpool, a jolly roger’s madness ride, that has no issue for a starstruck human being?
I see the Larger like I count my face, and it’s suspicious to me. It doesn’t count humans. Oh my goodness the proxies’ wear. Everything’s for the larger good, the whole. Individuals get trampled in the stampede, and we have to stand this, because it’s all a dream, even our suffering, and we are nothing more than sinless souls putting on masks of flesh for lifetime wears. The flesh doesn’t count. The soul does.
Great Department Green, is my soul in my beating heart, the exclamation point of tears in my eyes I fight back left and right? How heavy is this pain a moral wear, how real, fresh, and alive, and yet it’s cut asunder by ideas, by momentary experiences I’ve won and lost, by a look there a breath there on God’s heights, like you throw bones to dogs?
Feel me I’m real, the character, the mask, You’ve donned. I cannot last like this, a plaything upon Your pittance. I need Your honest answer to my living pain, or crush me now and don’t look down at me again (uh-gayn). The pittance, the role and show, how do we handle it?
Time is larger than our showroom. More power to yah God. What’s man doing there with his head blown off? It inspired an amazing journey. It manufactured an attempt to find another rule than suffering, point out joy as my hunting rifle. It’s my must now. It’s where I lay my head, oh time machine, I go. It’s important that’s a carpet, not a bed of nails.
Do you hear me breathe? I’m countin’ the breaths of all of us, and I am sin, hold me down?
I’m a soul warrior defeated. I’m immortal but can’t heal, shot by arrows of betrayal on the top of the lonely mountain. The wounds are deep and cold. Wind burns my wounds and waiting till the cold nights stop.
What do I do? Do I build a house on top of the mountain, or do I find a cave? I hate myself feels like I’m the evil spirit. The ocean is my tears. The pain is my curse breaking the wall of sanity and peeking through it.
I once heard that I’ll be the one giving the world peace. I can’t even give peace to myself. And that I’ll find eternal peace. I’ll give freedom to the world. I need someone to set me free, and the voices that do whisper to me is that there is peace in heaven that’s not in store for me yet.
If I give up now I give up faith in God. This life will be a burden. I’ll have nothing to lose, no strings, fall for eternity into the abyss.
Now I can see how evil people are forged, and those evil people proved that their parents won the game and have accepted the curse.
This moment I make a promise to myself on 30/7/25, 7:30, that I kneel down before no one, and that this is my game, my controller. I’ll make it clear as your eye, and I write my own story in my own brand.
Nithish, a 13-year-old Tamil boy, wrote this poem. This blog has chronicled his plight for over a year now. He’s recently begun writing poems again. To view his previous work, what he wrote before his ordeal began, click on the Page Nithish’s Blog on the top of this post. The difference is writing about the coming night and being in that night.
I, or my muse rather, has written to him this response, and it’s being smuggled to him now:
And the word crashes with God. What's the name of the monster? It's not yourself. Do the relationship as I do. Don't banish God to the outer ocean. God is bigger than your pen, than your thoughts of him. Alright baby, look into yourself and say, "I want to be the biggest truth I am. I want to feel this truth inside me startling my days. No problem this truth slips out of my hands. I will pick it up again. It is not darkness."
One of the photos I took of him in a secret meeting in April, the last time I saw him
Untitled
by S. Nithish
The Beatles needed each other. I need all of you together. Nithish can only take you to the door, but you have to open it.
* * * *
Soaked in pain, guilt. Let alone in the dark. Can’t find a ladder. I hit rock bottom and sink even deeper, laying for the lies that built the world. Where do I find a cure for this virus?
We stepped on a bubblegum. Will stick for life. Can I be forgived for being myself? Now I see how people turn evil and bad. Is it the society or the world or both?
I could almost call myself a homeless dog, but even the dog is happier than me. I saw a kid who can’t speak properly, but even he is happier than me.
The worst part about life for me is that I can’t go live with my daddy, [1] and I’m afraid that I can’t forgive myself till the end of time if I don’t go live with him.
Ever minute of my life spikes of sorrow and guilt. Poke me on the inside and the outside it’s been very long time since I’ve got wet in the rain of love and joy. [2]
Darkness on the corner and light on top of the mountain, it’s easy to run but can’t hide from the radiation of the bed I sleep in, the hole that I’m falling. The mud is soft but the hole is deep, and I’ve gone blind. I can’t see the world or feel the world of what it was.
I’ve never wanted to go to North Korea. [3] All I had to do was follow the damn train, [4] and I am warmed by his smile cause I’m the one who has his mouth stitched. Who am I? Why are we both chained to the pain of the world and suffer from this poison and keep drowning in the bottom?
Where is the divine? Is it a rock? Everybody thinks that I’m evil, bad, greedy, selfish. The one who really love me will really ever know me.
Where is my mother? [5] I don’t see her. Why aren’t you coming to the rescue? This is the story of the universe. Why aren’t you introducing the twist of my motive? My story is not filmed by IMAX. It is filmed by the divine, the universe.
What sin have I done and pay so much and put me in debt? Look into my eyes. See and feel the pain, guilt that is untouched by you.
[1] Me, what he calls me
[2] He lives under almost total control so that he will not make contact with me in any form and so that he will make passing marks in school, and that control entails being called names, being beaten and slapped. In his entire school career, and he’s now in 9th standard, he’s never been able to pass all of his exams. He has learning disabilities, mild dyslexia and severe dyscalculia, but his parents do not believe in learning disabilities nor will allow him to be tested for such. I was there from his birth and informed his mother of his dyslexia when I began trying to teach him the English alphabet when he was three, seeing him write letters backwards and not able to put sound to letters, and when he was not learning to read and write English in school, 2nd standard by this time, I taught him to how. His parents have been told it’s impossible for him to learn to read and write Tamil.
[3] A favorite activity of his growing up in my care was, when it rained, to take off all his clothes and go and play in it, I mean every time it rained and it wasn’t too late, on the roof when we lived in town, simply outside when we lived on the farm. I only made sure he didn’t harm himself or offend anyone.
[4] In our own personal speech between us, this phrase, which comes from a GTA gameplay video that he liked when he was six and watched more times than I liked, came to mean for us the simplicity of just going with the flow if it were taking us in a good direction, and we used it among ourselves to correct one another for going against that flow. The whole phrase is “all you had to do was follow the damn train CJ.”
[5] The Mother, Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator, who is for him is the divine mother and whom he adored and dreamed about often.
The poem was written by a 13-year-old Tamil boy. If you’ve read his previous poetry, it’s more organized than this and more poetic, but he’s suffered a lot since he was taken from my home a year and some months ago, and his poetry has suffered also. The first verse is classic muse, the inner voice of poetry, in its mode of giving advice and guidance, and so I set it apart from the rest of the poem. I suspect the rest of the poem is not pure muse, is him mostly just pouring his heart out, although still under the rush of inspiration and still in the voice of poetry. The trauma he’s suffered has almost turned off his muse, and, with the exception of a song he wrote upon being able to spend some time with me the first time since he was taken, “Heaven and Hell,” he gets very little muse now.
In the months before the was taken and his ordeal began, he wrote poem after poem, two raps, and a song from the muse, each spoken or sung to him on the inside, and each one a prevision of the future he’s now in, the raw hopelessness and desperation of this present poem so painful to read in the light of those past poems, which are full of confidence, faith, and resilience.
I am very familiar with his handwriting and form of spelling, and so I can make out what he wrote (you can see the dysgraphia) and organize it into lines and verses. I include the pieces of paper that he wrote this on at bottom. They were smuggled to me recently. He wrote this in school, in secret, on the back of exam papers. His muse told him to give it to me, and my muse told me to give it to you.
Months ago I gave his school a copy of all his poetry and asked that they provide for him a child mental health professional because he had mentioned suicide. I did this with a letter, as the parents have bribed the police near the school to take me to the station if I come there, what Nithish’s mother told him they had done, and what he warned me about. I might add that neither his school recognizes learning disabilities, and of him they have repeated what his mother told them, that he is acting and failing on purpose because he’s a smart boy.
I had complained to the Child Welfare Committee of Puducherry earlier, and they didn’t even know what dyslexia was, and a bribe was paid there also, his mother told him. The school has also complained that he thinks of me a lot, and that interferes with his studies, not able to recognize that he’s suffering the grief and heartbreak of the loss of a parent, a relationship with him they will also not recognize because I have no legals rights to the child.
It took months for the school to respond to the letter, and when they did it wasn’t to me or to provide him with care; they asked him to write a poem about his school, praising it, and they’d publish it in their weekly newsletter. The request that he write a poem came some weeks ago, and he wrote this poem instead, after much deliberation and anguish over the whole thing, but he’s afraid to give it to his school because his parents would see it and punish him for it, and so, I have to open the door, albeit without causing him further harm.
Harm's End 